On the Table in Europe
Borders blurred as Jews found community and safe spaces throughout Europe. Diasporic after persecution in the Holy Roman Empire, Ashkenazi Jews largely shifted toward modern-day Poland and Lithuania, experiencing significant displacement and migration within the continent. Throughout the early modern era, Jews moved in and out of cities, towns, and shtetls, making their culture and cuisine malleable and inherently agglomerated. For example, food historian Angela Hanratty examines how Ashkenazi communities in the Alsace region of France yielded elements of French cuisine in Jewish cooking. Similarly, (hobbyist!) Jewish culinary scholar John Cooper tells stories from Galacia, Austria, and Hungary – all places where Jews moved. Notably, Jewish norms of attaining education and their fostering a commercial presence led to cultural and population movement. Historian Hasia Diner writes how Jewish peddlers in Europe fostered a sense of “culinary cosmopolitanism” – bringing “exotic” ingredients, goods, and information to shtetls and cities alike. Cooper adds that peddlers carried kosher provisions and expectations on their journeys.
Ashkenazi Jews navigated rules of kashrut and different patterns of observance depending on what was sustenance was available and what local rabbis declared as custom. Rules and regulations differed among urban and rural areas, and that could come with a price. Consider kosher meat. Some cities added taxes to kosher meat but had no means of collecting tolls from villages, and slaughterers would change their pricing depending on who was buying. This meant that kosher meat was twice the cost of non-kosher meat, and the average weekly consumption was one pound of meat per household – and the average household size was between five and six.
The pricing and availability of food remained salient given scarcity and need in the Jewish community – half of all Ashkenazi Jews experienced poverty. With anxiety about access to food alongside the joy found in food itself, it’s no wonder that “people brought up in this world constantly talked and wrote about food as a marker of identity." Perhaps the easiest way to sum up Ashkenazi foodways is that what the wealthy ate every day, the poor reserved for ritual. Meat is again a good illustration here: while the wealthy could afford kosher meat during the week, the poor would reserve their consumption for the Sabbath. Shabbat meals were the embodiment of communal life for Ashkenazi Jews, who would usher in holiness through foods mandated – wine, challah – and customary – chicken soup with noodle after kiddush.
For both the rich and poor, Thursdays were Shabbat shopping days. And, notably, groceries not picked up by regulars in time to prepare for the sabbath meal would be distributed to the poor. Ashkenazi communities and kahals developed robust networks of charitable foodwork – bread lines, soup kitchens, and grocery distributions. In Poland, a Jewish worker’s organization opened soup kitchens that even offered education programming and consumer cooperatives. This legacy of communal charity and the social support structures to access good and holy food persist into the 20th century; fundraising in the United States by local organizations like Hadassah and larger organizations like Jewish Word Relief continued this type of food work.